THE TRANSITION FROM THE SLAVE TRADETO 'LEGITIMATE' COMMERCE Robin Law(University of Stirling, Scotland) Abstract: This study reconsiders several controversies resulting from the historical debate over 'legitimate' trade--nineteenth-century exports of African commodities other than slaves--in West Africa. The controversies reviewed include the incidence of enslavement in West African warfare; whether slave prices fell as slave exports declined; whether slave trade and 'legitimate' trade were compatible or incompatible; the debate over A. G. Hopkins' thesis of a 'crisis of adaptation' among political leaders; the commercial transition and gender relations; and the relation between the commercial transition and European imperial conquest. Disaggregation, noting the variations in the transition among regions and over time, Law believes, will resolve some of these controversies. Promotion of 'legitimate' trade, linked to the suppression of the slave trade, became a way in which Europeans both opposed slavery and intervened more and more forcefully in Africa throughout the ninteenth century. The legal abolition of the slave trade by the European and American nations involved in it occurred over a period of over thirty years, from the banning of the trade by Denmark, effective in 1803, to the eventual acceptance of abolition by Portugal in 1836; the critical step being the outlawing of the trade by Britain, the principal slave-trading nation, in 1807. Legal abolition was, of course, by no means the same as effective suppression, and the trade continued illegally well into the nineteenth century, as long as there remained a market for slaves in the Americas (principally in Brazil and Cuba). The trans-Atlantic slave trade did not come to a total end, therefore, until the 1860s. While the slave trade was in decline, other forms of trade between western Africa and Europe were developing.